It works out well for Apple, to be honest. The contact parts that them lock-in in to only one vendor just got nullified. They can now source parts from other vendors if they do choose - something tells me the ramifications of this for Qualcomm are worse than just st the fine... Apple can now do some hard nosed negotiating to reduce the price they pay for Qualcomm goods.
I am pretty sure that the Apple lawyers were absolutely expecting this outcome, which is probably the reason why they signed such a contract. The risk was mostly on Qualcomm's side, as they were the ones writing the shady contract, while Apple would benefit from cheap components, which is a safe benefit that they would not lose in case the shady parts of the contract would come to light and provoke law enforcement to step in.
Most likely they didn't yet plan to source the LTE chips from a second supplier at the time they signed the contract, so that limit didn't affect them. Nowadays they do have multiple sources, which is probably why they did not prolong the contract any further after 2016 - because having multiple sources was worth more to them than having this discount.
The Apple Qualcomm exclusivity agreement expired in 2016. So this doesn’t help Apple at all, except to the extent it sways public opinion on their worldwide litigation over Qualcomm’s sketchy not-really-FRAND approach of charging a percentage of the final device price, rather than a fixed price per chip.
Rights holders generally have to agree to license their patents on FRAND terms to get their technology included in wireless standards, in this case CDMA and LTE.
Qualcomm’s license pricing is, unusually in the industry, a percentage of the final retail price of the final device.
Apple’s argument is that this is not, in fact, a reasonable and non-discriminatory price for a license to use Qualcomm’s patents.
